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About the Event: In response to Hamas’s deadly attack against Israel and its citizens on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a significant ground invasion into Gaza in self-defense, aimed at eliminating Hamas’s military capabilities and removing it from political power. Israel’s military operations have generated extensive commentary about its compliance with international humanitarian law, particularly concerning the jus in bello principles of distinction and proportionality. However, there has been much less scrutiny of Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality, a well-established principle under international law that considers the overall scope of a state’s use of force and dictates that a war’s means must not be excessive in relation to its aims. Our paper assesses Israel’s compliance with jus ad bellum proportionality. After providing an overview of the jus ad bellum proportionality principle, we rely on novel radar satellite imagery analysis to document the widespread destruction that has resulted from Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Based on these data, we argue that Israel’s use of force is excessive, and that the war Israel is currently waging in Gaza is not in compliance with the principle of jus ad bellum proportionality.

About the Speakers:

Bailey Ulbricht is the founding Executive Director at the Stanford Humanitarian Program, where she works on legal research projects aimed at reducing harm in conflict settings and other insecure environments. She has a particular interest in how technology exacerbates harms, or conversely, how it can be used to document or reduce harms. Before coming to Stanford, she founded the humanitarian ed-tech nonprofit Paper-Airplanes, was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Turkey, and was a humanitarian worker with refugee communities on the Turkish-Syrian border. Bailey has two masters' degrees in Islamic Law and Islamic Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She received her B.A. in International Relations magna cum laude from Carleton College and her J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Allen S. Weiner, Senior Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, is an international legal scholar who focuses primarily on international security and international conflict resolution. He also studies the challenges of online misinformation and disinformation. Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law, the Stanford Humanitarian Program, and the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.  His scholarship is deeply informed by practice; he served as an international lawyer in the U.S. State Department for more than a decade before joining the Stanford faculty.  He earned his A.B. at Harvard and his J.D. at Stanford.

Jamon Van Den Hoek is an Associate Professor of Geography at Oregon State University where he directs the Conflict Ecology lab. Jamon's research focuses on using satellite and geospatial data to gauge the direct and indirect consequences of armed conflict on vulnerable people and landscapes. Before coming to Oregon State, Jamon was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Corey Scher is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Corey studies physical impacts of war and conflict using Earth observation data, geostatistics, and theory from the geosciences. His mapping of damage to urban areas in geographies including Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon has been featured in journalistic and humanitarian publications worldwide. He holds a master's degree in geology from the City College of New York and a bachelor's degree in geology from the University of California, Berkeley.

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